Syrian Refugee Camp

77 images Created 31 May 2013

SYRIAN REFUGEE CAMP. SYRIA.

April 2013. Bab Al-Salam Refugee Camp, 20 km. from the city of Aleppo, Syria.

The camp is located in the Syrian-Turkish border. It can be reached from the Turkish town of Kilis. In the press office a Syrian young man offer to show me the camp and explain me the current situation, anxious that transcends in the West to reach an endding to the massacres of the Syrian people.

Hundreds of tents are home to more than 15,000 displaced persons. The camp was estimated to approximately 5,000 people supposed that they were going to move to camps better prepared in Turkey, but the reality is that without passports do not let them enter because the displaced overpopulation, so overcrowding and resulting diseases are soaring at Bab al-Salam dramatically in recent months.

Most of the families who are living there already more than one year had their houses at less than 50 miles and now all they have is an empty tent. Some with more luck have small stoves. Most of them have experienced some dramatic episode (almost all children, 60% of the population in the field, must be treated psychologically and they're not even able to go to school), have witnessed the savage death of a family member and the destruction of their homes and their lands.

They are distributed by families, all of them are very numerous and there are hundreds of children that surround you at glance in a cloud of screams and raised hands with the symbol of victory. There are basic toilets that also use the women to change their clothes. Long lines of women and children end into a pair of tents which distributed food (usually very salty rice) in rations carried in small cubes to their respective tents. Another pair of tents are makeshift schools, where a seller of fast food teaches English. Another pair of tents are barber shops. Some sell clothes and candies that were brought from their abandoned business but hardly earn contribute a day since nobody has any money.

NGOs have set up a field hospital in the buildings of the ancient customs and a pharmacy where missing for months the most basic medicines. The aid does not arrive. A water tank can hardly supply to the entire population.

Morning dawns soon, women wash and hang the clothes around the tents, children go to school and play in the quagmire of the camp. Youngs play a football match in the afternoon. Men try to make infrastructure improvements but still there's not electricity so after sunset most of the families remain in their tents and try to sleep.

I could get only a very slight idea of the cold winter have passed, the hot summer that awaits them, their suffering and pain for the loss of their resignation and hope, their desperated cry.